Blood Exchange

Soviet doctors, with their characteristic well-why-not attitude toward new ideas, have lately been trying out a queer one. The idea: to cure people with opposite ailments by having them exchange some blood. They have experimented with the following "antagonistic" conditions: high and low blood pressure, overactive and underactive thyroid conditions, leukemia (overproduction of white blood cells) and shortage of white cells, pernicious anemia and overproduction of red cells, lack of menstruation and menstrual hemorrhage.

As reported in the American Review of Soviet Medicine last week, the process thus far seems to work in the thyroid and menstrual conditions. But U.S. doctors, who have tried similar exchanges on animals (TIME, Sept. 26, 1938), do not think much of this Russian idea. To be effective, virtually all the blood of the patients involved would have to be exchanged; and even so, the benefit would be temporary at best.

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